Hemingway wrote in his work Death in the Afternoon: "A moving iceberg appears noble, determined by its one-eighth of what surfaces." A writer adopts the method of omission, and if he does not understand, then this can only leave some vacancies in his own work. Hemingway has repeatedly likened his creative style to icebergs, "and the iceberg moves majestically in the sea because only one-eighth of it is exposed to the water." And it is precisely because of the "iceberg principle" that he follows in his writing, which forms a unique aesthetic imprint in his works, so it has achieved the literary height of Hemingway's works.
"Snow on Mount Kilimanjaro" is one of Hemingway's more classic short stories. The thin plot basically fades the conventional pattern of narrative stories, uses the perspective of "external focus", and only reproduces the memories of stream of consciousness through the dialogue between the hero and heroine, constructing a strong narrative tension and expressing the author's heavy thinking and questioning about life and death.
Mount Kilimanjaro as seen in Amboseli Park, Kenya
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > Kilimanjaro, snow, air-dried and dead leopards, vultures and hyenas all have special symbolic significance</h1>
Mount Kilimanjaro, with snow all year round and 19,710 feet above sea level, is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western peak is called the Maasai "Ayaki-E'ay", the Temple of God. Near the West Peak, a skeleton of a leopard that had dried and frozen was found. What is this leopard looking for in such a high mountain? No one can say for sure so far.
What do leopards look for in the mountains? Is it to get closer to the temple of God? Like the male protagonist Harry, he insists on leaving material wealth to come to Kilimanjaro to start this african journey. What is he looking for?
The journey cost Harry his life because of a scratch on his knee during the hunt, gangrene caused by improper disinfection, the only vehicle truck broke down halfway, and he and his wife and servants had to stay on the prairie to wait for the passing plane to rescue him. The novel begins with the invasion of death, three vultures hovering over the acacia tree where Harry is lying in the shade, Harry is now terrified of death, and seeing the vulture reminds him of his rotting legs, because of fear he constantly vents his bad emotions on his wife with nameless anger. The world-weariness of a dying person is actually with powerless self-abandonment, and behind it is the struggle to survive.
The part of Harry's recollection is in a different font, representing the separation of memory from reality. The first image of recollection is the railway station, which appears frequently in Hemingway's novels, carrying the waiting and parting train stations here, reflecting Harry's waiting for death and parting for life.
While the energy of life was constantly draining from Harry's body, hyenas began to appear around him. They lurked darkly among the long grass not far away, and the hyena's passage was like a wind that emitted an evil atmosphere, bringing him a weak and long emptiness.
Pike starred in the movie "Kilimanjaro's Snow"
Harry's experience of the impending death is also progressive. The vulture, who had disgusted him from the beginning, was constantly hovering as far as his eyes could see, and although he resisted, he had to face the warning of death. As a scavenger, the appearance of the vulture will make the reader think of death and corruption, leading to Harry's decadent life and the reality of imminent death. Hyenas are notorious predators of the African savannah, patiently snatching prey from other predators, and hovering around Harry for two weeks, waiting for the weak endurance of their opponents, as they must have in Harry's constantly exhausted health. Harry's heart transitions from resistance to fear to confession after the exhaustion of patience, and in the process of seeing Harry's retrospection and introspection of life, nostalgia and relief.
Mount Kilimanjaro, which has been covered in snow for many years, means in Swahili: a brilliant glowing mountain. It did not appear on the map for centuries, because Europeans at that time did not believe that a snowy mountain would exist on the equator. Harry, as a European who had participated in the war, this "non-existent" mountain range was nothing less than a place of miracles, and he tried to purify his gradually blunted perception lost in the reality of materialism through a journey close to this mountain, and regain his keen heart and creative desire as a writer. The snow on the top of the mountain is the purity and beauty sealed in the ideal place, and Harry, who has lost his talent in the life of a drunken fan, tries to remove the fat of the soul through the washing of the journey, and seeks the return of the inner self.
Harry ended up like the leopard who didn't know what to look for in the cold mountains, and was "frozen" to the top of the snowy mountain. At the end of the novel, Harry dies in a dream, the non-existent rescue plane in the dream, taking him to overlook the African land, through the spikes and deep valleys, through the locust arrays and waterfall-like blizzards flying from the south, and finally Harry sees the white to the dazzling Kilimanjaro Mountain, the sun and the white snow shine together, life and death cross the border, in the spiritual Garden of Eden, Harry contentedly walked towards eternal death. The leopard represents Harry's pilgrimage heart, and his spiritual essence is like the existence of a leopard frozen into a statue, frozen into a watchman posture.
Stills from the movie "Snow in Kilimanjaro"
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > see the harsh reality beneath the rose-colored fantasy from the tireless replay of death in memory</h1>
Harry's memories floated up between conversations without warning, and lumps of memories huddled together like separate whispers. In the fragmented message, a piece of Harry's poor birth, with the dream of a writer, joined the army and experienced various emotional lives for the sake of increasing experience. The writing technique of intersecting virtual reality reflects the glue between ideal and reality, and the contrasting structure provides the key to opening the spiritual world of the characters.
"I will write down what I see", Harry's literary dream pushed him into the experience again and again, he longed to see the changes in the world, but also in the change of the world, in order to fill the complexity of his life, he walked into the most real battlefield, but also in order to experience the complexity of emotions, he chased a game of love.
Death and love intersected in his memories, and the brutal battlefield and the woman's carcass became a meaningless scene, and he only remembered running desperately on the battlefield until his lungs hurt and his mouth was full of rust. There have also been marriages because of love, but too many dew love affairs stay on the animal senses, just like the continuous death on the battlefield washes away his awe and sympathy for life, and the wind and moon game with too many strange women also consumes his perception of the sincerity of love. Emotional blunting is a hammer that shatters Harry's writer's dream, destroying the momentum of decay, his ideals and love are lost in the materialistic desire of instinctive survival, and the enthusiasm and ideals of the past are withdrawn from the heart, leaving an impotent, nameless body full of nameless anger and dissatisfaction.
He hated his current wife because she was rich enough. Money eroded his soul, tenderness was a hotbed of decadence, he spoke lies, a trick he used to make a good life, but in his heart he gritted his teeth and resented it—it was not the life he wanted.
The subtle beauty and joy of Harry's memories are effortlessly annihilated by the intense shock of death, and the joy of watching out for each other among the poor people who grew up in the slums is powerless to support this death sonata that will be engraved in his memory and played on a loop. He had imagined himself to be a sharp blade that used the pen as a thorn in the face of reality, sacrificing the blood of youth for his idealism, but the cruelty of reality easily blew away his youthful, rose-colored fantasies, and he was depraved, indifferent, hedonistic, full of lies, married to rich and lonely women, drunk in cynical complaints.
"Going to Africa" is Harry's remaining shame, and in his view, a hard trip is like a boxer's hard training in the mountains, which seems to give him a return of writing power. Yet, having been immersed in materialism and hedonism for so long that he had blended in, even though defined as a pilgrimage, he took his beautiful wife with him and could not do without his servants. This is undoubtedly the most realistic irony of Harry's starting point, that he will never be able to regain his original self - only death.
Dadaist woodblock oil painting: Arp, "Combination of five white and two black forms, variant III"
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > from the "Dada movement", look at the disillusionment and spiritual tragedy of the young generation in the context of World War I</h1>
Harry's descent from a young man with dreams and ambitions to a spiritual emptiness attached to money, under the mediocrity, he is convinced that he has lost his keen observation and writing talent, deliberately acting absurd, chasing seemingly deviant passions.
The twentieth-century German politician Derich Naumann once said: "War politicizes the masses." The Dada Movement was a revolt movement that arose in the literary and artistic circles in the context of World War I. Through all anti-aesthetic works and acts, it expresses the rebellion and ridicule of the social environment under the war.
If the core essence of the "Dada Movement" can be summed up in one sentence, it is to be meaningless and meaningless, to oppose for the sake of opposition. The basic propositions of Dadaism are anti-rationality, anti-tradition, anti-conventionalism, anti-domination, anti-constraint... It arises in a chaotic world, and is committed to relentlessly creating chaos, breaking all stereotypes and patterns, with a strong nihilistic tendency.
The war brought people closer to their thoughts and emotions, and Dadaism soon formed a retinal effect, spreading and replicating with a spark of fire. This carnival of denial of the meaning of reality will not become the spiritual pillar of people's confusion, and a noisy meaningless act will eventually settle into a more empty absurdity, and with the end of the First World War, the Dada faction has also announced the end.
Harry's decadence in life, the pursuit of meaningless love, the cynicism of everything he has and loses, and the lingering sense of disillusionment that arises under the chaos of the spirit are all absorption and interpretation of Dadaism. Harry has a beautiful, gentle, considerate and wealthy wife, a group of servants, living in the highest neighborhoods of Paris, but he still feels the loneliness of the soul, the sense of alienation between people cuts off emotional bonds, and people live as an island. Harry's wife loves him fanatically because of fear of loneliness, or rather, loves the "past" he betrayed to her, a talented writer full of creative desires. In his wife's deep love, Harry is madly envious of the "once" he has sold, and in reality, Harry, who is alive, is like a Dada nihilism, and behind the nothingness is the brutal war that robs humanity.
Hemingway in his youth and old age
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > deconstructing "The Snow of Kilimanjaro" from Hemingway's personal experience, Harry is a projection of Hemingway himself, representing the "lost generation"</h1>
Hemingway once said: "The writer is to write about the truth, to express the truth on the premise of understanding where the truth is, and to make it a deep reader's consciousness as part of his own experience." Hemingway's work is full of reflections on life and death, and the tone is shrouded in a gray haze, with a kind of magnificent sadness. This work, which has a strong personal imprint, is inextricably linked to Hemingway's own experience.
Hemingway was born in the United States Oak Park Wallon Lake farmer family, since childhood to hunting, fishing, camping and other outdoor sports have a deep interest, under the baptism of nature, Hemingway's novels in the mountains, lakes, forests and wild descriptions are very simple and moving, and there are many plots of hunting and fishing. In this book, for example, there are descriptions of hunting and country memories. Hemingway participated in and experienced World War I and World War II as a war correspondent, and on the European battlefield, he was seriously wounded and underwent 13 surgeries, removing more than 200 pieces of shrapnel from his body, and later he also experienced two plane crashes. Witnessing a great deal of death and cruelty up close on the front lines of the war, both physically and psychologically, inflicted hard damage on him that was difficult to heal. Hemingway's classic war-themed novels were born out of his insights and reflections on war.
Having experienced life and death, he has passed with death several times, so that Hemingway has a unique view of death: "I have learned to face death squarely, and death has its own beauty, a quietness, a deformation that will not make me afraid." "The Snow of Kilimanjaro" embodies his aesthetic perception of death to the fullest, Harry's birth and life trajectory is extremely similar to Hemingway's personal experience, and even the four relationships mentioned in the book also correspond to Hemingway's four feelings in reality. Harry's perceptual experience of death is undoubtedly a turning point of his real experience, and the dream before his death sublimates the death that is seen as the end into a pure yearning, and the few sentences of description of the top of Kilimanjaro convey the joy and tranquility of Harry, the miserable survivor, who is finally liberated, which is what Hemingway called the beauty of death. As the American scholar Robert Spearer commented: "He wrote only one theme: how humanity would face death in a world that had lost all value and was left with only strong emotions." ”
Hemingway's novel "The Sun Also Rises" quotes a sentence by the American female writer Gertrude Stein as the inscription of the novel: "You are all a confused generation", and since then, a type of American writer represented by Hemingway, who appeared during the first and second world wars, has been called a "confused generation". The similarity of this type of writer is that they have all experienced the catastrophe of imperialist wars, and are therefore particularly concerned about the fate of young people in Europe and the United States under the post-war socio-economic crisis. Many young people who hold patriotic illusions have been devastated or even killed by the war, and the literature of the "lost generation" is precisely to touch this group of young people with a compassionate gaze, dissecting the confusion and bitterness of the turbulent life they faced after they were seized by the war to have a outlook on life, values and moral codes. Harry is an image created by Hemingway, he can not face the emptiness and pathology of his own soul, so he has to shrink into the shell of escape, seek pleasure, waste time, the normal demands of life are suppressed, trying to relieve mental pain with stimulating activities, only to fall into an even worse cycle.
Hemingway
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > concluding remarks</h1>
Harry's death in the novel, crossing the "locusts of the south" and "the storm of the eye" in the rescue plane, is another metaphor of "under the iceberg", as if through the rain of bullets and bullets, only to reach the most sacred highland of the heart, Harry understands that "that is where he is going now", the ultimate destination of the rescue is death, which is Hemingway's pity for his characters and his own situation.
Reading Hemingway's novel, you will be unconsciously sad, because you know his final ending, and you want to know, Mr. Ernes Termill Hemingway: When that bullet passed through the skull, did you see a spiritual place like Harry?
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